Half Light

by Heather Minette

Half Light offers readers a space to breathe, again, in a necessary reverence for ordinary life. Through these poems, it becomes possible to look closely at life’s loneliness, life’s losses. As this beautiful collection progresses, Heather Minette brings into language the kind of moments where suffering is worst because it is wordless – “I thought, in that moment, / that the whole world would stop / and grieve for you too.” This book is a collection unafraid of grief, and therefore unafraid of exploring joy, too, and love in the same breath. The world Minette creates in Half Light is alive with the glory of everyday objects, splintered beams and buckled floors, whiskey, scabbed knees and sundresses, and thanks to Minette’s keen eye, readers will emerge from that world better ready to appreciate their own.

~ Joanna Eleftheriou, Assistant Professor of Literature at The University of Houston – Clear Lake

In Half Light, Heather Minette invites us to experience vulnerable moments with a rare, understated craft. This book is brave and precious.

~ Moriah LaChapell, Editor at The Blue Hour

I have been reading Heather Minette’s work for years. She has the gift of the perfect line and her empathy and understanding have always impressed me. In Half Light, she has tapped into something deeper. These are poems of loss and love, of sandpaper and velvet, of joy and heartbreak. In poem after poem, she demonstrates her versatility, and her depth of penetrating compassion.

~ Corey Mesler, Author of Among the Mensans and Opaque Melodies That Would Bug Most People

book purchase link:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/heather-mine...

info:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/06/15/hea...

58 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2018

About the author

Heather Minette earned her M.A. in Literature and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from the University of Houston – Clear Lake, and a graduate certificate in legal studies from Rice University. She lives in Kemah, Texas with her husband and son.

Reviews

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a child, I told my mother the alphabet was broken after I’d seen it, for the first time, written down. Something about it, there, all in one place. Also, I wouldn’t hold my breath in front of my action figures. I tell you these, here, because it seems necessary to repeat them as is, as summoned, in my reading of Heather Minette’s Half Light. These are poems of ash and glyph. Of men who believe cigarette over bridge and of women who sculpt faces that their own might become unstuck. These are stories, really. Cloaked urgencies. The statuesque inevitable. I saw things in this book and looked from them to see myself, in the mirror, answering a telephone. Minette fashions spirituals for the plainly dressed and has an eye, not only for detail, but for detail’s double. In Half Light, death has only ever happened once, and is resurrection’s safe space. In Half Light, Minette is six years old, nine years old, thirteen years old, and then born knowing age has nowhere to leave its mark. How does one flee exodus? Or record the unnoticed blip of reckoning? How is the firefly not more known for its time spent as darkness? I didn’t read it here, but remembered, while here, that I read, elsewhere...how mail carriers don’t believe in the afterlife. Minette conjures first, responds later. This is a patient language. This, an abbreviated yearning. A father goes from storyteller to jokester because, when laughing, we all weigh the same. If there is mourning, there is also the chance to rename the toothless mermaid identified by her hair. If there is a passing, there is also a poet who knows that loss is, at best, a ghostwriter. Minette knows what she’s doing. To read this book is to haunt its absence.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have been reading Heather Minette’s work for years now. She has the gift of the perfect line and her empathy and understanding have always impressed me. In Half-Light, her newest collection, she has tapped into something deeper. These are poems of loss and love, of sandpaper and velvet, of joy and heartbreak. In poem after poem she demonstrates her versatility, and her depth of penetrating compassion. ‘If I had the courage/I’d ask you to remember,’ she says in “Sea Glass.’ And another paean to memory is entitled ‘The Things I Need You to Remember.’ There is longing here, but there is also peace. So astute is Minette’s writing that these poems will still be read after other contemporary young poets’ work has faded from memory.”